"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play." 
- Abraham Maslow

October 29, 2017

Gorillas and Bananas Hackathon in the Creative Entrepreneurship course

Last week, coinciding with Dutch Design Week (DDW), a 100+ students of the course Creative Entrepreneurship engaged in a hackathon in which they were faced with the grand challenge - How might we foster creativity & entrepreneurship in higher education? The week long immersive team activity required the teams to learn and implement the principles of design thinking process (see: https://creativeentrepreneurship.nl/creative-entrepreneurship-hackathon/) and is meant to cultivate the creative confidence of the students to solve complex problems. Student teams were provided with the guidance of a team consisting of two Barcelona-based accomplished designers, a NYC-based designer, an education innovator, and the course instructors, as they defined a specific problem, brainstormed possible solutions, converged on a particular solution, built a prototype of their solution and prepared their pitch (see photos). Throughout the process, the students tweeted teams’ selfies and the various stages of the work at #CEhackathon17 (see the link at the top of the webpage). On Friday afternoon, all teams and a distinguished panel of judges assembled at the Auberge for the team pitches. The event was exciting and festive and culminated with three team awards (see photos) – most innovative, most out-of-the-box, and best team-work, especially designed by Nicole Vindel and Gaston Lisak, our Barcelona designers guests. 

On a personal note, we’d like to say that despite the extremely intense work associated with preparing it, and especially with the intensity of last week’s actual hackathon, seeing the excitement, the energy level, and happy faces of the students (not so much when they started off ☺), as they became immersed in the assignment and culminating on Friday afternoon, made it all worthwhile.

An assignment such as this requires months of preparation, attention to multiple details, and careful coordination. We couldn’t have been able to pull it through without the help of many in addition to those who appear on the website, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them: TiSEM-planning specifically Sjanet van Vugt and Christa de Kort; TiSEM vice deans education and research, Philip Joos and Geert Duysters; TCE and James Small; the secretarial team of the Management department; Vesna Nedimović;. We also once again want to warmly thank the judges who took their task very seriously, and of course to acknowledge Nicole and Gaston’s amazing work.

Thank you all!!!

Tal and Joshua